In the Labyrinth: A User’s Guide to Bolaño

You have to question the detective skills, to say nothing of the clerical skills, of Roberto Bolaño’s literary executors. The job they did of sifting through his unpublished writings in the immediate aftermath of Bolaño’s death in 2003 can’t have been especially thorough, for every other week, it seems, they find themselves tripping over another stout stack of papers, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a new thousand-page opus on pornography, obscure minor poets, and the end of the world. If you’re a Bolaño neophyte, this must look intimidating. Where to enter?

Probably not through the latest lost work to surface, “The Third Reich,” a moody and uneven novel about a German war-games champion published by FSG at the end of last year. “The Third Reich” should join that shelf marked “For Completists Only,” on which also sit “Antwerp,” “Monsieur Pain,” “The Romantic Dogs,” “Between Parentheses,” and “The Skating Rink.” Although “The Third Reich,” which seems to represent Bolaño’s first attempt at novel-writing, is not without certain characteristic charms—black comedy, idiomatic vigor, a looming and ineffable sense of doom—its power is only intermittent and its prose (“Her sweetness, her charm, her soft gaze, put everything else—my own daily struggles and the back-stabbing of those who envy me—into perspective, allowing me to face facts and rise above them”) is often as flat as old seltzer water.

As it happens, prose-flatness is not atypical of Bolaño (whose story “Labyrinth” appears in this week’s issue of the magazine). He was something of an anachronism: a great novelist who was not a great writer. You have to go back to Balzac and Dostoyevsky to find masters of the novel form who showed so little interest in the sentence. Indeed, Bolaño seems to disdain Jamesian refinement and polish, and this disdain is of a piece with his broader skepticism toward literary people, or merely literary people—those whose hunger for books is unmatched by a hunger for life.

The narrator of “By Night In Chile,” for example, one of the most morally execrable characters in the Bolaño oeuvre, sits out the great political struggles of his time—Allende’s experiment in socialism and Pinochet’s ensuing coup—and instead devotes himself to rereading the Greeks:

I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often)…

In Bolaño, it is always the moral toad who expresses himself like a prince.

Bolaño is unliterary, anti-literary. In 1976, in his early twenties, after publishing a book of poems, he left Mexico, where he was surrounded night and day by writers, and embarked on years of dissolute and impecunious wandering around Europe. He wanted, he said, “to live outside literature.” But literature wouldn’t let him go that easily. He finally settled in a resort town on the Costa Brava, and appears to have spent the last decade of his life convulsed by inspiration. It was a supernova of creativity whose light is still arriving at our shores. Not all of the many novels and stories he wrote are keepers, but the best are very good indeed. Here, then, are some suggestions for navigating the Bolaño labyrinth.

1) “Last Evenings on Earth” and “The Return.” For my money, these two short stories (both of which lend their titles to the English-language volumes in which they appear) are the greatest things Bolaño ever wrote. They are both ghost stories—and in this respect they are representative, for all of Bolaño’s work is death-haunted and is perpetually reminding us of Nietzsche’s warning against thinking of life as the opposite of death: “The living are only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that.” In the first story (which appeared in the December 26, 2005 issue of The New Yorker), the main character, B, holidaying with his father in Acapulco, is haunted by the shade of a forgotten surrealist poet, Gui Rosey, who was killed by the Nazis during the Second World War. Almost nothing happens—Antonioni could have adapted it into a good film—and yet the story’s simmering atmosphere of barely suppressed violence and dread comes slowly to a boil. “The Return” is itself narrated by a ghost who is forced to look on at the unlovely fate of his corpse. Everything relies on the unlikeliness and audacity with which Bolaño elaborates his conceit, so the less said the better. But rest assured, you have never read a story quite like this one before.

2) “By Night in Chile.” The narrator of this novella, part prose poem, part dramatic monologue, is Father Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest and literary critic. He is dying. He has done something terrible, or has been accused of doing something terrible, and is determined to clear his name. Instead, without Lacroix realizing it, the book becomes one of the most excruciating self-incriminations in literature, a kind of distended “Tell-Tale Heart.” By the end we realize very clearly that damnation is just as much a secular as a religious category.

3) “The Savage Detectives.” Bolaño can be cold, terrifying, and morally severe (see “By Night In Chile”), but he also invented Juan García Madero, the seventeen-year-old disaffected law student and aspiring poet whose ebullient and meticulous diary constitutes the first hundred and fifty pages of “The Savage Detectives.” The intensity of Madero’s responses, to literature and to life, is at once comic and poignant. When he reads a highly erotic poem called “The Vampire,” he can’t help “locking myself in my room and masturbating as I recited it once, twice, three times, as many as ten or fifteen times, imagining Rosario, the waitress, on all fours above me, asking me to write a poem for her long-lost beloved relative or begging me to pound her on the bed with my throbbing cock.” A meeting with the beatnik poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano leads Madero into the city’s teeming literary underworld. At length, Lima and Belano come to dominate the narrative, as we are told about their global wanderings by a chorus of shifting narrators, and the bracing intimacy of Madero’s journal is replaced by a mood of chilly contingency.

4) “Nazi Literature in the Americas.” This mock reference book of imaginary right-wing litterateurs—including soccer-hooligans-cum poets and a sci-fi novelist who excitedly envisages Hitler’s Reich triumphing in the United States—is every bit as fun as it sounds. Like David Thomson’s “Biographical Dictionary of Film” or, indeed, Philip Rees’s non-fictional “Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right,” “Nazi Literature” is not a book to read straight through, but rather to dip into whenever the mood (in this case a rather dark, antisocial mood) takes you.

A postscript. Avoid “2666” for as long as possible, and for heaven’s sake, don’t start with it. The book is a desert of negative space across which the panting reader will search in vain for the traditional pleasures of the novel: form, character, coherence, meaning. The most famous section, “The Part About the Crimes,” subjects us to a peeled-eyeball inventory of hundreds of murdered female corpses, the victims of an epidemic that has been afflicting the city of Santa Teresa, a fictionalized Ciudad Juárez. The result is neither horror nor sympathy. It is exhaustion.